Yesterday, as the smoke cleared from Julia Letlow’s 57-43 blowout win over John Fleming, I was reminded of how much different the 2026 U.S. Senate race is, structurally, from a couple of the more destructive and divisive statewide races people remember in recent years.

Specifically, the 2015 and 2019 gubernatorial races.

Because the butthurt – and I’m using that word because it’s the word Brian Haldane used this morning on Talk 107.3 during the segment I did with him discussing Saturday night’s results – being felt by some of Fleming’s supporters was every bit as bad if not worse than what we saw from Ralph Abraham’s supporters in 2019, or Jay Dardenne and Scott Angelle’s supporters in 2015. The inability to bring those people on board Eddie Rispone’s and David Vitter’s bandwagons in the four weeks between the jungle primary cycles and the general elections after a bruising internecine fight among Republicans was the primary factor in John Bel Edwards getting elected twice.

Letlow isn’t going to have the same problems Vitter and Rispone had. For two reasons.

The most obvious one is that Jamie Davis, the socialist cotton farmer from Tensas Parish that the Democrats have nominated, is not John Bel Edwards. Davis has zero appeal outside of the black Democrat base, nor does he have any money or any prospect of raising any. Edwards had the trial lawyers writing him check after check, plus the national Democrat Party smelled victory and threw millions of dollars at him. None of that is coming Davis’ way. And when people listen to Davis, they’re going to recognize, as I said in the Haldane segment, that he’s Kamala Harris in overalls. So no, he’s not getting Fleming’s voters.

But the other reason Letlow is going to cruise to victory is that instead of a truncated and compressed general election cycle like Louisiana has in its statewide elections, where you’ve only got four weeks from the jungle primary to the general, now it’s four months.

And so the Fleming supporters who filled up Facebook and X yesterday, screeching about their indignation over the “dirty” campaign Letlow ran against Fleming – that race was dirty on both sides, which is what you’re going to get in a closed party primary when there aren’t a lot of major differences between the candidates – and emoting about how much they hate Julia Letlow.

A lot of those people angrily declared their support for Jamie Davis while proclaiming their conservatism.

Why do this?

There was a great deal of screaming about “dark money” on Letlow’s side. That wasn’t really the case. What the screamers were angry about wasn’t dark money, it was PAC money. And PAC money isn’t very dark. You can go to the FEC website and see who funds a PAC and where it spends its money on, which is fairly transparent, all things considered. Letlow didn’t beat Fleming with dark money.

The PAC money wasn’t why Fleming lost, by the way.

Joe Cunningham’s autopsy of the race which we ran here yesterday had a couple of very good points which deserve a second mention.

First, Fleming made carbon capture the centerpiece of his campaign, presumably because Letlow’s fiance’ Kevin Ainsworth, the former LSU baseball player who’s a lobbyist at the Capitol, has oil and gas industry clients who are pushing carbon capture. As Joe said, that isn’t really perceived as a national issue to be properly litigated in a Senate race. I’d go further and say that how Team Fleming pursued the issue was simply bizarre, and their approach didn’t really drive home any advantage.

If you want to run on an anti-carbon capture platform, that’s fine. Making it the centerpiece of your campaign when it isn’t an issue most voters in the state care much about might not be the smartest choice, but on the other hand if you’re going to be in a low-turnout race and you can galvanize the opponents of carbon capture behind your campaign, maybe it’s a way to steal a march on Letlow.

But from the beginning, Fleming’s camp alienated the Louisiana Freedom Caucus legislators who were actively pushing bills on eminent domain and property rights in fighting on the carbon capture issue. So he wasn’t the anti-carbon capture candidate so much as he was a particular genus of anti-carbon capture candidate. When you do that, it means you don’t move votes.

And also, if Fleming was offering any real deliverables on the issue, like he would go and pass a bill banning taxpayer dollars for tax credits or grants or whatever for carbon capture projects, I didn’t see it.

That just came off like Fleming was cranky and fussy about Julia Letlow’s fiance’ – which is not really a great electoral strategy.

The other key point Cunningham made was that for a grassroots campaign, Fleming’s crew didn’t seem to have a lot in the way of actual people in the field. Online, they were ubiquitous – but  Facebook and X are not accurate as a microcosm of the real world. And if you’re going to run a grassroots campaign, meaning you aren’t funded with corporate money and you aren’t doing a ton of big media buying, it’s not impossible  in general. But it is impossible without a massive ground game. You need phone bankers, door knockers, people giving old folks rides to the polls – an army of volunteers. And not just to make indignant comments on Facebook, because – and this is going to rub some people the wrong way – that doesn’t actually persuade or motivate anyone to get the vote out for your candidate.

A grassroots campaign had better have actual grassroots people. Fleming clearly didn’t have enough of that.

But the observation I would throw on top of Joe’s diagnosis would be this – the minute you hear that so-and-so candidate is going to self-fund the majority of his race, you shouldn’t take him seriously. He isn’t going to win.

And I say this as somebody who spend lots of years doing sales and fundraising – I still have to do it from time to time – and absolutely despise having to do it. But if you want to run for office and you think that self-funding is a viable substitute for fundraising, you are doing it wrong.

Fundraising is, fundamentally, asking people for their vote on steroids. When you sit down with the donor class, regardless of what you might think of “monied interests” and/or how corrupt these people might be, you are going to get tested – your message, your background, how viable you are, what sort of stances you’re going to take and how you’ll take them and lots of other things. Some of these donors don’t even care about ideology; they’ll write a check so they get access to the people who win. And in a way, the feedback you get from asking them for money is the most honest thing you’ll hear – those donors can give you a good read on whether you’ll win a race with the message you have.

A self-funder is flying blind without that information.

Fleming’s campaign appeared to be flying blind pretty much from the jump. And it never got better. Last week they even put out a poll which had them six points up on Letlow, which was absolutely absurd given that she’d finished 17 points ahead of him in the primary just a month earlier. To go from six up in your numbers to 14 down when the real numbers come in is a massive embarrassment; it tells you just how off-track your read on the electorate is.

And then to accuse Letlow of rigging the election after the fact, like some of Fleming’s supporters did?

Guys, please. Stop.

It’s four months from now to the election in November. Most of the dumber things circulating online now will be forgotten by then, and that’s a good thing.

Hopefully, some of that time will be spent on introspection. Conservative insurgent candidates need to do things a little better if they want to achieve political power.